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Sunday, September 19, 2010

Information Literacy Skills - a curriculum to follow?

I have been following, with interest, our classmates' discussion about the teaching of information literacy skills.  A long debate between teacher librarians has been the concept of a set 'library' curriculum, versus a series of integrated lessons in collaboration with classroom teachers in the current academic curriculum.  My school district recently opted for the former, creating a concrete K-12 'continuum'  (a large and impressive looking professional binder!) which merges distinct information literacy learning outcomes with current instructional outcomes in English Language Arts and Social Studies.  Connecting information literacy skills with the set curriculum enables teacher-librarians to approach classroom teachers with collaborative ideas while not 'wasting' time on 'non-makrable' activities.  In the ever-expanding academic curriculum, classroom teachers must balance their teaching time wisely, and cannot 'afford' to give away precious teaching time to activities that do not necessarily translate to the report card.  While we, as TLs, know that information literacy reinforces lifelong skills across the academic board, this continuum shows classroom teachers how information literacy skills can be taught in conjunction with their set curriculum, not outside of it. 

I encourage everyone to check out this worthy continuum published by the Kamloops/Thompson School district at :

http://hgec.sd73.bc.ca/library   

(look to the right for links to the K - 12 Information Literacy Continuum)

2 comments:

  1. Mmm....do you think that all the work will generate the ownership the TL craves. Will anyone outside of the TL community look at it?

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  2. A very timely comment, Anne - I was just creating a 'collaborative' unit (largely by myself) with the help of this continuum, and realizing, at the same time, that it is a very tough sell to get classroom teachers to sit down with me to go over the curriculum that we have created as TLs.

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